“Do you want me to try?” asked Marlin.

“Ha! I wish,” sobbed Fiona. “Why do they make it so hard?”

“Can’t we hire someone to do them?” asked Marlin.

“No. We can’t afford it,” said Fiona, using the phrase she was by now so sick of. She felt like she used it every day. And she wondered when would come the day that she had to use it for groceries. Do not borrow trouble, she heard her mother’s voice in her head.

She began to keep a notebook of all her parents’ favorite phrases for bucking the girls up. Surely there was help there somewhere. Don’t borrow trouble. Always look on the bright side. A stitch in time saves nine. The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings. But every night she still came home to the unconquerable taxes, which always ended in tears of frustration.

One day when she took Al’s dinner over to him, instead of grabbing it from her and shutting the door as he usually did he said, “Marlin says you can’t do the taxes.”

“I’m still trying,” said Fiona patiently, thinking, What do you care?

“Give ’em,” he said in his characteristic brusque way.

“What do you mean?”

“Bring ’em over.”

“It’s all online. I’m using Martha’s computer.”

“All right. I’ll come over there.”

Fiona didn’t know what to think. Al had never done anything without expecting something in return. All the way back to their house she wondered what it was he wanted but she couldn’t imagine. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth popped into her head from her parents’ lexicon. So she set him up quietly in her aunt’s office with Martha’s computer, their banking information, and the partially filled-out forms. He was still working on them and eating the pie out of his dinner container when she went to bed.

“Why is he doing it?” she whispered to Marlin.

“Perhaps out of the goodness of his heart,” said Marlin. “He must do some things just out of the goodness of his heart.”

“He never has up till now.”

“Maybe he’s going to demand three meals a day in return,” said Marlin.

“He would have asked for it up front. He likes to negotiate, I think. Why did you tell him I was having trouble anyway?”

“I don’t know. It just slipped out. Because he was nagging me to nag you about the taxes because Mr. Pennypacker was on his case and he was saying how Mr. Pennypacker, or that garden gnome as he calls him, wasn’t part of the original agreement and if you didn’t get him off his back soon the deal was off and blah blah blah and I just blurted out, ‘Well, she’s doing the best she can. She’s sobbing over them every night as it is.’”

“Oh,” said Fiona. “That’s probably why then. He probably wants to keep Mr. Pennypacker off his back and figures it’s faster in the long run to do the taxes himself.”